The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published a new reference architecture to assist enterprise IT professionals with the integration requirements of hybrid cloud computing. IT environments are now fundamentally hybrid in nature - devices, systems, and people are spread across the globe, and at the same time virtualized. Achieving integration across this ever-changing environment, and doing so at the pace of modern digital initiatives, is a significant challenge. This deliverable explains the core reference architecture and concepts for hybrid integration in the enterprise. It is available for download at: http://www.cloud-council.org/deliverables/cloud-customer-architecture-for-hybrid-integration.htm.

Arista cEOS introduces the containerized packaging of EOS software and its agents for deployment in cloud infrastructure with the same proven EOS software image that runs on all Arista products. These flexible deployment options empower cloud network operators that are customizing their operating environments to provide a uniform workflow for development, testing and deployment of differentiated services. It enables the provisioning of a robust and proven network operating system across production and development platforms with a uniform EOS distribution and single-image consistency.

Kinetica, provider of the fastest, in-memory database accelerated by GPUs, today announced its real-time analytics and visualization solution is immediately available on the Nimbix Cloud. Providing instant results and visualized insights across massive streaming datasets, Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud can be launched in seconds and is the ideal solution for GPU-accelerated analytics.

"Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud harnesses the power of parallel GPUs to deliver real-time analytics and data written to Kinetica is automatically routed to parallel connections across the cluster," said Amit Vij, cofounder and CEO, Kinetica. "The full Kinetica stack can be provisioned with a couple of mouse clicks from the Nimbix console or launched and automated with JARVICE's powerful task API."

Last Tuesday, parts of the Internet came to a grinding halt when the servers that powered them suddenly vanished. The disappearing server act came from servers that were housed as part of Amazon S3, Amazon's popular Web hosting service.

When that incident happened, several big and popular services and Web sites were disrupted, including DraftKings, Gizmodo, IFTTT, Quora, Slack and Trello.

According to the Web site monitoring firm Apica, 54 of the largest online retailers experienced performance impairments on their Web sites, with some slowing down by more than 20 percent; 3 sites went down completely (Express, Lulu Lemon, One Kings Lane); and for effected websites, average slow down time was 29.7 seconds - 42.7 seconds to load.

What happened?

"At 9:37 a.m. PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process," Amazon said. "Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems."

Those subsystems are important. One of them "manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region," according to Amazon. And without it, services that depend on it couldn't perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, "manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate." The placement subsystem is used to allocate storage for new objects.

RiverMeadow's support for AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions enables customers to sign up for an account and consume RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS directly through AWS Marketplace, with integrated monthly billing based on consumption. The customer experience and workflow is designed around a native AWS customer experience from an account security, identity, and commercial perspective. In addition to consumption based billing through AWS Marketplace, customers can still procure volume subscriptions directly from RiverMeadow.

Today, Cirba Inc. announced the general availability of cloud migration and cost analysis capabilities in Densify.com, its SaaS hybrid capacity analytics solution. Along with Expert Insight from Cirba's Densification and Transformation Advisors, Densify.com now offers end-to-end transformation and capacity analysis for hybrid cloud environments. The analytics enable automated capacity decisions and optimization to ensure applications always have the right amount of the right kind of capacity with little or no waste. For a first-hand look at the power of Densify.com, access the free trial.

"The move to hybrid cloud for most enterprises is being slowed by complexity of making the decision as to how to balance demand across all their infrastructure options including on premise and public clouds," said Gerry Smith, CEO of Cirba. "After months of working with our partners and customers it is clear Densify.com's SaaS analytics enable optimal decisions so that organizations may confidently transform their infrastructure."

GigaTrust, a leading provider of endpoint security and document in-use protection, today announced the availability of GigaCloud, a fully-managed Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for secure endpoint document protection. GigaCloud delivers secure email and document collaboration services anytime, anywhere, on virtually any device and any platform with real-time data analytics, reporting and administrative tools.

In today's mobile society, email and documents are the lifeblood of communication among employees, partners and customers. But, with the rapid increase in data breaches, the need for document security is paramount. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average worldwide cost of a breach is $158 per record - a 29 percent increase since 2013. Balancing the need for collaboration with enterprise security and control to protect information against breaches, non-compliance, hacks and intellectual property theft from any mobile or desktop device represents the most significant challenge for organizations of all sizes in all industries.

Organizations often struggle with piecing together disparate security solutions to protect their universe of documents, but there is a better way. GigaCloud is the first and only secure email and document protection, consumption and collaboration service backed by cloud infrastructure and a complete security ecosystem. The GigaCloud service delivers the encrypted email and document protection that organizations and government entities need; in the configuration that works best for them.

Cavium, Inc., announced today that they are collaborating with Microsoft on evaluating and enabling a variety of cloud workloads running on Cavium's flagship ThunderX2 ARMv8-A Data Center processor for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The companies are also demonstrating web services on a version of Windows Server developed for Microsoft's internal use running cloud services workloads on ThunderX2. The server platform is based on Microsoft's Project Olympus - Microsoft's next generation open source hyperscale cloud hardware design. The demonstrations will be shown at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit in San Jose on March 8 and 9, 2017 and are the result of an extensive long term collaboration between the two companies.

2nd Watch has been recognized by Gartner in its first-ever Magic Quadrant on public cloud infrastructure managed service providers. In the report, Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide (February 2017), Gartner positioned 2nd Watch in the Leaders quadrant for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Founded in 2010, 2nd Watch was among the first audited AWS Managed Service Provider Partners. The firm has helped some of the world's biggest brands use AWS, including Crate & Barrel, Condé Nast, Coca-Cola North America, Lenovo, Motorola, SCOR and Yamaha, while earning AWS Competencies in Financial Services, Enterprise Migration, DevOps, Big Data, Marketing and Commerce, Life Sciences and SharePoint. 2nd Watch was also the first cloud-native managed service provider to earn SOC2 compliance. The firm is opening an East Coast Managed Cloud Services Center in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2017.

Businesses need their own website to increase their online presence. Having a good and professional web hosting is necessary to have a high digital visibility. The trends in web hosting have evolved over time and now companies have many options to choose from.

With growing development, VPS servers have gained recognition. Companies and individuals are choosing virtual private servers and hosting due to the benefits it offers. Such technology has proved to be highly beneficial especially for companies. It absolutely makes sense why many organizations are shifting towards such facility. Here are five benefits listed:

I have written on the topic of cloud-induced transformation of IT in the past. Adapting IT audit and monitoring processes to cloud infrastructure is one of the challenges I come across when it comes to cloud rollouts.

In a 1990s-era data center, everything revolves around hardware and virtual machines. Big, monolithic applications are installed and run on servers. Servers themselves run in the private subnet (secure) or public (DMZ), and they have various security agent software installed to monitor and log everything that goes in and out of these machines.

Digital transformation has easily become a core focus for companies across the globe. Many businesses are now looking at ways to introduce the use of analytics, social media, mobile technology and innovative software to improve their internal processes, value propositions and customer relationships.

However, to successfully embark with a digital transformation, you must first look at the important elements to ensure you create a successful strategy.

Are you afraid of using cloud services? Well, you should be because the very computing service's model introduces many different reasons to be concerned. There are a number of security flaws common across many different cloud services. In some cases, the cloud service or website poses a security threat and risk to one's privacy by its very design. Let's look at the biggest problems that come with using cloud services, websites and their associated apps.

Non secure Exchanges of Information

When you are connected to the cloud, you have to exchange information with the cloud servers. Your data is at risk when you upload it to the cloud or download it. Dropbox had to patch a flaw found in 2015 that allowed hackers to steal new information uploaded to its cloud through compromised third party Android apps. This is separate from the 2011 glitch that temporarily allowed anyone with a password to log in and view customer accounts.

Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, is launching out of stealth today and announcing version 1.1 of its NVMesh® Server SAN software for exceptional Flash performance for web and enterprise applications at any scale. Funded in part by Fusion-io's founder David Flynn, Excelero enables enterprises to deploy next-generation data centers modeled after the standard hardware-based hyperscale IT architectures of technology giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. With NVMesh, customers can leverage the full performance of NVMe flash at data center scale, with predictable application performance and astounding price/performance levels for even the most demanding applications.

NVMe holds the promise of unlimited performance for hyperscale environments, but current inefficient storage and application architectures suffer from low utilization rates - as little as 25%. In nearly three years of development, Excelero has achieved 11 patents or patent-pending innovations for the ability to virtualize the NVMe devices and unify the capacity into a single pool of high-performance storage - to flexibly provision storage to applications as they need it.

Google had several big tech and service announcements at this week's second annual Google Cloud Next conference here. But the company is also leveraging a surprising resource to win enterprise customers - people. It's surprising because Google's biggest successes have come from technology that pretty much sells itself, such as search and related advertising services like AdWords and AdSense.

But in those areas, Google succeeded because it was able to adroitly exploit its first mover advantage. In cloud computing, it trails the clear leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) and second-place Microsoft Azure. So at Cloud Next, the company did what smart competitors do: it unveiled new features and pricing designed to better position the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as a worthy alternative...

Enterprises are on a cloud analytics adoption journey from collaboration to enhancing business processes and strategies.

These and many other fascinating insights are from The State of Cloud Analytics, 2016. You can download the report here (41 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Informatica and Deloitte sponsored the study with industry analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Based on interviews with 402 respondents, 25.6% of which are senior managers, followed by C-level executives (23.6%), and senior directors/directions (20.9%) in late 2016 the study provides insights into current and future adoption plans of cloud analytics...

ViON Corporation, a market leader in the design, delivery and maintenance of mission critical IT infrastructure solutions, today released new guidance for organizations as they re-evaluate their cloud strategy in light of the widespread AWS outage last week. As a long-term advisor in cloud computing for agencies and commercial enterprises, ViON is sharing the content throughout their network to help customers and non-customers gain stability amid a perfect storm of questions across the market.

“The outage shines a light on the vulnerability that IT managers and c-level executives face in business operations and data management – and we realize what a tremendous responsibility it is to plan for and anticipate all the possibilities,” explained Rob Davies, Executive Vice President of Operations. “We’ve served these leaders for many years and we feel it’s important to continue serving this community with sound advice and information as the stakes rise higher and higher.”

So the last couple of days I’ve been watching closely on the keynotes at #GoogleNext, where Google was showing alot of the new enhancements to their platform. So a couple of weeks back they also introduced a new relational database service which is geo syncronous as well called Spanner

Now up until now Google has been one of the cheapest providers when it comes to regular IaaS, but now they have also announced commited use discount as well which will cut the IaaS cost even more. Let me give you an example.

Blue Medora announced yesterday continued strong growth with its sixth consecutive record-breaking quarter. Over the past year, Blue Medora grew its product business by more than 240 percent and increased their customer base by 200 percent.

Closing the year with strong Q4 performance, the company expanded the business 254 percent from the previous year, exceeding expected interest in SelectStar, Blue Medora's native database performance, analytics and health monitoring platform.

The Wipro HOLMES Cloud BOT leverages applications and infrastructure data residing in multiple data sources in the client’s environment, and facilitates collaboration between stakeholders from IT and business teams to create a comprehensive digital repository. This helps in analyzing and predicting viable cloud placement decisions, based on rule-based algorithms and past learning to accelerate the client’s cloud journey.